No, that's a misconception that led to decades of vulnerabilities.

You see, you can (usually) easily tell what a particular escaping transformation does. That does not tell you neither how it will be interpreted down the line, nor what should be done.

Arguably the most common problem is double escaping. This typically manifests as various double escaping bugs.

If your hand rolled implementation just chains `.replaceAll("<sepcial>", input)` and `.replaceAll("<escape>", input)` the escaping result depends on evaluation order, at least on already pre-escaped inputs if your instruction sequences are single-element. Even if you get it right and don't reduce escaped sequences to double escape + unescaped, you are still dealing with stray escape sequences: "John o\'Doe".

You have to meticulously (all the way through your call tree and even through persistent storage cycle!) track if a value has already been escaped and whether it needs escaping. As paradoxical as it may sound, meticulous and defensive escaping produces tons of bugs. If the project decides to escape raw inputs right when passed in, escaping them once more before passing out (to storage, another process) is a bug that you cannot easily statically test against.

On top of that, various modules that you interact with (storage, libraries, modules pulled from another team) will have different escaping semantics: some will apply escaping on their own, some will expect input to be "sanitized" and treat it raw. The semantics can even be different on different paths: write to storage module accepts input as is, but retrieval method "helpfully" runs escaping.

Furthermore, in different contexts the escaping rules are going to be different. In a web world, what's safe to write directly to html, pass to js `alert`, and pass to sql query are entirely different things. Input safe to dump into html is not necessarily safe to pass to string-interpolating SQL DTO layer, and vice versa. Then the DBA changes config to allow variables in queries and your escaping _semantics_ are now entirely different.

It's a minefield with essentially unbounded surface. You will trip up. People have tried to solve the problem for decades. Very smart people have tried. They all have failed.

Alignment in LLM Land is probably like 'laws' in Human Land. They exist, and you probably SHOULD follow them, but you don't HAVE to.

But see... this is why it is a perfect long term job in the age of AI;p Them peoples think they found ultimate hack.